A Novel High Throughput Method to Investigate Polymer Dissolution

Abstract

The dissolution behavior of polystyrene (PS) in biodiesel was studied by developing a novel high throughput approach based on Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) microscopy. A multiwell device for high throughput dissolution testing was fabricated using a photolithographic rapid prototyping method. The dissolution of PS films in each well was tracked by following the characteristic IR band of PS and the effect of PS molecular weight and temperature on the dissolution rate was simultaneously investigated. The results were validated with conventional gravimetric methods. The high throughput method can be extended to evaluate the dissolution profiles of a large number of samples, or to simultaneously investigate the effect of variables such as polydispersity, crystallinity, and mixed solvents.

Dissolution of styrene–butadiene block copolymers in biodiesel

“…Among the bands mentioned previously, the vibration of ring quadrant stretching at 1602 cm −1 , which did not overlap with any of the absorption peaks of biodiesel (also shown in Fig. 1), has been used successfully to study the dissolution behavior of PS in biodiesel 11. This band was used as the characteristic signature of the copolymer samples to study their dissolution kinetics in biodiesel.…”

“…The trends in the dissolution kinetics obtained from both methods were in excellent agreement; this demonstrated the validity of the high‐throughput FTIR microscopy approach for dissolution testing. Our previous study11 showed that there was a slight discrepancy between FTIR microscopy and gravimetry methods at long dissolution times, and this was attributed to the presence of dissolved mobile polymer in the multiwells in the path of the IR beam, which explained the plateau in the data at less than 100% dissolution. One can easily test large numbers of samples more repeatably with the FTIR microscopy method.…”

“…These studies clearly demonstrated the feasibility of the dissolution of waste plastics in biodiesel. This work was complemented by the development of high‐throughput methods to investigate polymer dissolution in solvents 11. A rapid prototyping method was developed to fabricate multiwell substrates, which were used together with high‐throughput Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) microscopy to simultaneously study the effects of the temperature and polymer molecular weight on the dissolution kinetics of PS in biodiesel.…”

Spectroscopic methods and their applicability for high‐throughput characterization of mammalian cell cultures in automated cell culture systems

“…No commercial systems are available for infrared spectroscopy that can analyze samples in MTP format. However, some systems that operate with 4 * 4 wells have already been published .…”